Penelope's Tapestry
by elenathehun
Summary: Unlike the original woman, Penelope didn't wait for her lost husband, and Percy Weasly grieves.


I wrote this because I read a Percy/Penelope/George story and thought the whole thing amazingly OOC. So I wrote something more realistic. The story was Love is the Child of Endless War by **Fortuitous Intervention** at _The Sugar Quill_.

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When Percy Weasley died, he went out with a bang in some pathetic third-world country with the ubiquitous '-stan' suffix and the usual terrorist problem. The police found a finger, a wand, and quite a lot of blood and pulp, but not much else. The government wasn't really big on investigating the deaths of a few insignificant foreigners, though, so he was declared dead in another one of those regrettable diplomatic incidents in a world full of 'em.

He was survived by his wife Penelope and son Stephen.

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A year later, he was languishing in prison – well, not really languishing. More like doing hard labor for peanuts (the literal kind, I mean). '-stan' countries are not particularly fond of the idea of prisoner's rights, so it wasn't like he could complain to the police of prison brutality. And oh, was it brutal. He got tall and tan and muscled breaking up rocks, and he got all scarred from getting knifed and whipped and beat. One of his new and disreputable friends taught him how to use a knife, 'cause he was a babe in the woods, really.

His wife took off her mourning weeds and started going out again.

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After five years of incarceration, Percy converts to Islam and becomes a mujadeen in Afghanistan. Who knows why he did it? Perhaps he felt that _anything_ was better than prison, or perhaps he really believed – a jailhouse conversion of sorts. Either way, he was thrown into a war they had lost in every way possible as Kabul fell and the American tanks rolled. In the end, he took his people and ran into the Afghani mountains. They butchered their way across Pakistan and India as mercenaries call AK. In Calcutta, a few years later, they split up for parts unknown. Percy got on a ship bound for Singapore with some half-assed idea of going home and finding his family.

The moment Percy steps on the ship, Penelope is giving birth to her second child. George Weasley holds the little girl and tells Stephen, "See. This is your little sister. She's your responsibility now."

Little Stephen looks up seriously and tells him, "Yes, Daddy. I know."

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Ten years post-death, Percy finds himself on English soil again. He doesn't kiss it, although he wants to. He went the long way – through Malaysia and Cambodia and Vietnam, through China and the Korean Peninsula (the border in surprisingly porous these days) and onto Japan. He made enough money in the Japanese economic miracle to find his way to Australia, and from there he went up the spine of the Americas from Chile to Texas. On the plane to London, he engaged in a spirited 'discussion' on immigration rules with a lovely young Hispanic doctor in perfect, unaccented Spanish.

Stephen struggles to learn the basic grammar of English. Penelope tells him it's all exceptions, anyway, and George just laughs at his studious son.

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On the fourteenth of April, he peered through his mother's kitchen's windows and saw his brother kissing his wife. He walked away with them not a whit wiser to his liveliness, to parts unknown.

Well, that's not true. He went through the Continent, through all the old Warsaw Pact countries, where he picked up a reputation as a nasty mercenary by the name of Mean Red. There wasn't much work, though – after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, it all went downhill from a mercenary's perspective.

He went through the Balkan states and the Middle East, and then through to Africa. He'd never been there before, so why not? In Sudan, though, in a church compound, he was caught in a village during a microbreak of Ebola. He died spewing blood out of every orifice imaginable, and some you can't. The surviving nuns burnt his body to a fine sterile ash, and he was dumped into a hole in the cemetery.

Stephen Weasley posed for a picture with his mom at his graduation ceremony. His father George smiled at him with tears in his eyes.


End file.
